Lior Zoref

Early life and education Zoref studied at the Technion. He later completed doctoral studies at Bar-Ilan University, where his research examined the use of social networks and collective intelligence in decision-making and career guidance.

Career From 1996 to 2010, Zoref worked at Microsoft, where his final position was vice president of marketing for the company’s consumer and online services division. He has been profiled in the press, and in 2012 the Israeli news site "mako" included him in its annual list of the most interesting people of the year.

TED talk At the 2012 TED conference in Long Beach, California, Zoref gave a talk on the wisdom of crowds that he developed with the help of his online network, which TED described as the first crowdsourced TED talk. The talk was also mentioned in The New Yorker.

Mindsharing Zoref’s book Mindsharing: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything was published in 2015 by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin. and Library Journal, and was included in a 2016 Inc. magazine list of recommended books for entrepreneurs.

Research and other work Zoref’s research on collective intelligence has been published in peer-reviewed journals; a 2020 study he co-authored with David Passig in Interactive Learning Environments examined the use of social networks as a collective-intelligence tool for decision-making about adult lifelong education.

Zoref is also the founder and chief executive of Yesh Matsav , a nonprofit organization that works with at-risk youth through lectures and personal-coaching programs founded in 2022.